Eight IT Predictions for 2011 and Beyond

Organizations will need to show a link between IT investments and business results.

Continued cost pressures, limited growth opportunities, and low risk tolerance mean the information technology (IT) function will face increased levels of scrutiny by internal and external stakeholders. This will require IT spending to become more tightly coupled with business results.

So says “Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users 2011 and Beyond: IT’s Growing Transparency” from Gartner, an IT research and advisory company based in Stamford, Conn.

“Gartner’s top predictions showcase the trends and disruptive events that will reshape the nature of business for the next year and beyond,” says Brian Gammage, vice president and Gartner fellow. “Selected from across our research areas as the most compelling and critical predictions, the developments and topics they address this year focus on changes in the roles that technologies and IT organizations play in the lives of workers, the performance of businesses, and the wider world.”

Top predictions for 2011 include:

1. By 2015, 10% of your online ‘friends’ will be nonhuman

Social media strategy involves several steps: establishing a presence, listening to the conversation, articulating a message, and, ultimately, interacting in a two-way, fully engaged manner.

Thus far, many organizations have established a presence, and are mostly projecting messages through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates that are often only an incremental step up from RSS feeds.

By 2015, efforts to systematize and automate social engagement will result in the rise of social bots—automated software agents that can handle, to varying degrees, interaction with communities of users in a manner personalized to each individual.

2. By 2015, a G20 nation’s critical infrastructure will be disrupted and damaged by online sabotage

Online attacks can be multimodal, in the sense of targeting multiple systems for maximum impact, such as the financial system, physical plant, or mobile communications.

Such a multimodal attack can have lasting effects beyond a temporary disruption, in the same manner that the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. had repercussions that have lasted for nearly a decade.

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